I have spent the last few days devouring podcasts and articles about the best books of 2014. I haven't heard of many of the books discussed, but that doesn't stop me from greedily marking off new books to read and nodding with satisfaction at some of the choices.
I got a little thrill of delight to discover that I had read 4 of the New York Times Top 10 list for the year, and that there were among my favorite books of the year. They included:
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr: I think this one may be on every single roundup of the year that I've seen--definitely a general audience pleaser. I read it on my trip to Seattle for my grandmother's funeral in September. And I just got it to give to my mom for Christmas. Set mostly in Brittany, France, and a mining town in Germany, Doerr masterfully shifts between two stories. Werner lives with his sister in an orphanage, and is destined to become a mine worker until he discovers his talent for constructing and repairing radios. He is recruited to become part of the Hitler Youth, where he develops a way to track down Allied forces who surreptitiously broadcast low frequency radio messages. Marie-Laure is a blind French girl who is forced to flee with her father to a great uncle's home in Brittany during the invasion of Paris. Her father has devoted his career to working as the lockmaster at the Natural History Museuem. In order to nurture his blind daughter independence, he builds her scale replicas of their neighborhoods that provide her with the visual map necessary to navigate on her own. Eventually, their paths meet up. The writing is gorgeous and the characters shimmer in front of you. Wonderful.
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill: I read this one twice in quick succession when AJ was out of
town with the boys and MJ was at band camp. I had biked around the lake and over to Chipotle and then brought my food to the neighboring park to sit and eat and read. The narrator is an unnamed woman who gets married, has a baby, struggles to maintain a writing career, and then to understand her failing marriage. The narration has a scattershot feel, a deliberate choice by Offill to help us understand her anxieties, frustrations, and anger. There are a few neat narrative tricks that were quite satisfying. And I liked this from the Amazon review: the novel "shimmers with rage and longing and wit." I also really enjoyed listening to the Slate book discussion about it.
Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast. This one also drew me in and I sat and devoured most of it in one sitting. Roz Chast, the New Yorker cartoonist, has written a graphic novel memoir about her and her parents as they declined in health, suffered dementia, moved out of their Brooklyn residence of 50 years to an assisted living facility, and then eventually died in their 90's. As the only child, she feels a great deal of stress and anxiety in trying to care for them and deal with many momentous decisions, while at the same time confronting her conflicted feelings in particular about her mother. It is heartbreaking, genuine, and sublime.
The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. I love Elizabeth Kolbert's environmental writing for the New Yorker, and this book expands on her work there. It turns out, as she aptly documents, that the world is in the midst of a massive dying out of many species due to rapid changes in the earth's atmosphere, oceans, and climate--populations of frogs in Central America, bats, coral, and rhinos are rapidly declining. She combines writing about the scientific discoveries around extinction and other historically relevant episodes with fascinating science reporting about what is being done to try to prevent species devastation. So so good. I absolutely loved her description of diving at the Great Barrier Reef, and am determined to go there someday before it completely disintegrates due to ocean acidification.My other favorites from the year: This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a collection of essays by Ann Patchett, The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd, and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.
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